Okay, so here it is. Jason Lev first surfaced on my radar back in the early 2000's, when Steve at Blackwax records hipped me to a mix series he'd found on deephousepage.com That series was called 'Sounds of Gold' and was a collection of some of the rarer and less played cuts from the Paradise Garage era disco scene. As I was just discovering The Loft, the Garage, The Gallery and the fact that disco was actually very cool, I was only just scratching the surface with the more mainstream hits, Philly Int, Salsoul, West End, Prelude, so the cuts on Sounds Of Gold, just blew my mind - this was serious heat from even a seasoned diggers point of view. Jason Lev was a name I'd not heard and the mixing was tight, so tight in fact I was thinking that it was computer aided or at least edited later.
So I was rocking these mixes for a minute and FFWD a year or two and Niki, Steve (Blackwax) and myself were down at a club called Plastic People in London when Theo Parrish dropped a heavy edit of Unity by Tony Aiken & Future 2000 (or so Niki told me, of course I'd not entered my P&P freak-out stage yet so I didn't know the record in question). After some heavy googling, turns out the cut was on some obscure label called 'Truth Is Light' and was edited by Mike Cole and Mark Grusane of Mr Peabody Records in Chicago. Finding a copy was not easy as it was on a seriously limited distro and everywhere had sold out. Luckily managed to find a copy on GEMM for cost price from some little dude's shop in deepest France, and he had another release on the label too (also at cost) so I picked them up. A couple of other deep spinners I knew (Ramar from Voices being one) had a copy, so I thought it's be a bit special. Both 12"s were seriously deep, heavy edits of crazy disco - right up my strasse!
Don't hear much more for a couple of years, I'm smugly watching the 12"s get more sought after, and then BANG, all of a sudden Andrew at Earcave (www.earcave.com) has 4 new records on Truth Is Light, again, all K.I.L.L.E.R. no-one's ever heard of tunes, edited for dancefloor devastation by label head Jason Lev and various other serious cats. Phew!
And the goodies just keep coming, now Jason has just set up a website for the label and is releasing a new series of 7"s all of which sound superb - the first is already out and can be ordered from his site. Also included on the site are the excellent 'Sounds Of Gold' mix series with the artwork and (almost - everyone's got secrets) complete tracklistings. Must also mention that 2 new 12"s are also fresh new out and available from Phonica here in the UK. Go Truth Is Light!
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